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FIGURE I
Map of Salem Village, 1692, frontispiece from Charles W. Upham, Salem
Witchcraft: With an Account of Salem Village and a History of Opinions on
Witchcraft and Kindred Subjects (Boston, 1867). Courtesy, Danvers Alarm
List Company.
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FIGURE II
The Geography of Witchcraft: Salem Village, 1692, in Paul Boyer and
Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft
(Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 34. Courtesy, President and Fellows of Harvard
College.
between the village and the neighboring commercial Salem Town (of
which Salem Village was a separate parish). And it was an economic difference that eventually divided the village geographically into two conflicting groups. Boyer and Nissenbaum suggested that the poorer
agrarian householders who lived on the western side of the village set
their hearts and fears against their more prosperous and commercially
minded neighbors who lived in the eastern part of the village, nearer the
town, and economically benefited from it. Ultimately, according to
Boyer and Nissenbaum, the conflict between the two groups was
between differing visions of community: an agrarian-based, older
Puritan sense of the public goodwill contrasted with a later emergent
capitalist sense of private interest. This clash led the frustrated westerners to respond by charging the easterners with witchcraft. One summary
of Salem Possessed put it this way: The Salem trials can be seen as an
indirect yet anguished protest of a group of villagers whose agrarian way
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Contrary to Boyer and Nissenbaums conclusions in Salem Possessed, geographic analysis of the accusations in the village shows there was no significant villagewide east-west division between accusers and accused in
1692. Nor was there an east-west divide between households of different
economic status. Equally important, eastern village leaders were not
opposed to the villages attempts to gain independence from Salem
Town. Though Salem Village suffered from years of internal conflict
over its ministers and replaced them at an unusually frequent rate, these
conflicts did not have an east-west geographic or economic character.
The village was remarkably homogeneous in its geographic distribution
of wealth at almost all economic levels during this period. The same distribution holds true of the villages religious and social demographics.
Though it may appear that the Salem Possessed map carries the burden of the argument about the socioeconomic and geographic foundation of the witchcraft accusations, the map does not supply all the
evidence. A note to the map in Salem Possessed explains that for different
reasons a total of thirteen accusers were omitted, thus indicating that
the map is incomplete and does not represent all the accusers. The map
is more properly understood as an illustration of the socioeconomic
argument; it is not its proof. Indeed the authors introduce the map to
the reader as a kind of geographic clue to the rest of the books findings.
Nevertheless Boyer and Nissenbaums use of the map confuses these two
purposes, clue and proof. On the one hand, the quantitative comparison
of the numbers of As, Ws, and Ds that appear on the eastern and western
sides of the map suggests that it presents objective evidence of a geographically divided village and that it reveals a straightforward numerical
pattern. On the other hand, the explanatory note states that the map
deliberately omits a number of well-known accusers, some because of
their youth and others because of their support for some of the accused.
These omissions indicate that the map involves an important interpretive
component, in this case concerning the accusers ages and motivations.
The note also implies that the map is complete except for the specified
omissions, which is not the case. Thus the maps relationship to the
information contained in the court records is unclear: it is interpretive
and incomplete yet seemingly offered as objective and exhaustive.
It is necessary to create a map as objective and complete as possible
based on the court records before presenting any extrapolations about
3 vols. (New York, 1977). As one of the editors of the new edition of the Salem court
documents, I have had the benefit of examining the fifty-odd Salem court records
that were overlooked or unknown when Boyer and Nissenbaum published Salem
Witchcraft Papers. See Bernard Rosenthal et al., eds., The Records of the Salem WitchHunt (Cambridge, forthcoming).
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the Salem Village accusations. All maps involve some interpretation, but
there is a difference between necessary selection and adaptation of a data
set and interpretations built into the map that already present a perspective
on the data the map represents. The selection of data and methodology
should be as transparent as possible. Working with databases makes transparency easier because of the explicit database requirement to document
every data point that appears on the map. With a comprehensive map,
scholars can then ask some questions about the data presented. By examining the locations of the most frequent accusers, for example, one may wonder what they have in common, geographically or otherwise, and then pose
the same question about the accused. The basis for any such geographic
questions, however, must be an accurate map of accusers and accused.
Explaining the errors and assumptions involved in Paul Boyer and
Stephen Nissenbaums map of the village accusations requires understanding how the map was made. Boyer and Nissenbaum tell the reader
that they used the Salem Village map from Charles W. Uphams book, a
detailed and fairly accurate rendering of the house locations and geographic boundaries of Salem Village and its immediate environs in 1692
(Figure III). Upham placed numbers and symbols on the map to designate the locations of 150 houses and structures in Salem Village and
neighboring townships. Each square marker on the map stood for the
location of a house and each number correlated with Uphams 1692 list
of property owners, which was based on Salem deed books and local
knowledge. Number twenty-four, for example, designated the location
of Thomas Putnams house, which was the home of two adult accusers:
Putnam and his wife, Ann. Boyer and Nissenbaum placed two As at this
location on their map to represent these two accusers.7
7 A close-up of Thomas Putnams house (number twenty-four) on Uphams
map with Boyer and Nissenbaums superimposed As is available on
http://oieahc.wm.edu/wmq/Jul08/ray.html. In the process of digitizing and georeferencing Uphams map using geographic information systems (GIS) software, I gave
each of Uphams numbered house locations a black dot (see Figure III). The dots
indicate geographic points with coordinates in real geographic space. Some of the
extant 1692 houses represented by numbers on Uphams map are still standing on
their original foundations. I used a geographic positioning system device to determine the latitude and longitude of these houses on site. These known coordinates
served as control points that linked the digital version of Uphams map to real geographic space for purposes of georegistering the map and rectifying its errors as best
as can be done using GIS software. The process resulted in a slight warping and
stretching of the digital version of Uphams map. The consequent offset between
Uphams paper map and geographic accuracy averages approximately five hundred
feet, which is sufficiently accurate for these purposes. See Mike Furlough, The
Salem Witchcraft GIS: A Visual Re-Creation of Salem Village in 1 6 9 2 ,
http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/libsites/salem.
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FIGURE III
Georegistered version of Uphams map with geographic information systems data points.
Placing the Boyer and Nissenbaum map, with its As, Ws, and Ds,
over the georegistered Upham map offered a useful means for checking
the Salem Possessed maps accuracy and also served to correlate its otherwise anonymous As, Ws, and Ds with Uphams household markers and
numbers, thus identifying the people represented by letters on Boyer
and Nissenbaums map (Figure IV). The correlation between the letters,
markers, and house numbers turned out to be fairly close in most areas,
except near the center of the map where the correspondence was inexact.
Never theless, by using the cour t documents and Boyer and
Nissenbaums census of the Salem Village households, it is possible to
identify the people in those households and their roles in the witch trials
as accusers, accused, and defenders and to locate them with sufficient
accuracy on the map.8
8 Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, eds., Salem-Village Witchcraft: A
Documentary Record of Local Conflict in Colonial New England (Belmont, Calif., 1972),
38393. I follow Boyer and Nissenbaums use of the term accuser to refer to anyone
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FIGURE IV
The Geography of Witchcraft: Salem Village, 1692 superimposed on
Uphams georegistered Salem Village map. The Geography of Witchcraft:
Salem Village, 1692, in Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 34.
Courtesy, President and Fellows of Harvard College.
Boyer and Nissenbaum placed an all-important east-west demarcation line at the center of their map without explaining its precise location. The lack of explanation is curious because positioning the line
slightly to the west would have made a significant difference in the
crowded center of the map, shifting several As to the eastern side of the
village. A close-up view of Boyer and Nissenbaums dotted demarcation
line neatly dividing As and Ws (overlaying the Upham map) highlights
this area (Figure V).
The numerical count of As, Ws, and Ds that accompanies the Salem
Possessed map refers to accusers, accused, and defenders located within
whose testimony in support of a charge of witchcraft was recorded in a court document, including those who initiated complaints on behalf of those who claimed to
be victims of witchcraft. Like Boyer and Nissenbaum, I use the term accused to
refer to anyone named in a court document on the basis of testimony by an accuser.
I do not include people who were said to have been cried out but never formally
charged or who do not appear in any of the surviving records as accused.
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FIGURE V
Enlarged center section of The Geography of Witchcraft: Salem Village,
1692 superimposed on Uphams map. The Geography of Witchcraft:
Salem Village, 1692, in Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 34.
Courtesy, President and Fellows of Harvard College.
the Salem Village boundaries, though the map itself shows a number of
people in these roles outside the village in neighboring settlements. The
map indicates that there were fourteen accused witches, thirty-two
accusers, and twenty-nine defenders in Salem Village. Elsewhere Boyer
and Nissenbaum give different tallies of accusers and accused in the village. For example their documentary source book Salem-Village Witchcraft
lists twenty-six accused witches as village residents. Included in this list
are eight people shown on the map in Salem Possessed as living outside
the village boundaries. A subsequent map, published in Boyers cowritten Enduring Vision, shows only eleven accused witches within the village borders.9 There is a similar problem with the number of accusers in
the village. The Salem Possessed map displays twenty-nine As in Salem
Village, whereas the numerical count that accompanies the map says
there are thirty-two accusers. This number includes three As located just
across the villages northern boundary in Topsfield.
For the sake of completeness, corrections to the As and Ws on
revised maps presented here include those located both inside and outside Salem Village boundaries within the same geographic area as Boyer
9
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FIGURE VI
Boyer and Nissenbaums unpublished map of the accusations in Salem
Village. Courtesy, Paul Boyer, Stephen Nissenbaum, and the Phillips
Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Mass.
Turning now to the accused outside the village, the cluster of five
located to the southeast just below the village boundary represents five
members of the Procter family (John Procter; his wife, Elizabeth; and
three of their children, William, Benjamin, and Sarah). The Procters
lived in the area called Salem Farms, an inland segment of Salem Town
immediately to the south of the Salem Village boundary.11 Thus John
specific place of residence at the time and therefore I cannot represent Sarah Good or
her accused four- or five-year-old daughter, Dorothy, on a revised and corrected map.
11 Salem Village was originally part of Salem Town and often referred to as
Salem Farmes or simply the Farmes. In 1672 the Farms succeeded in petitioning
the town and the General Court for permission to organize a separate parish called
Salem Village for the purpose of hiring a minister and building a meetinghouse of
its own. To support the new ministry via taxation, leaders geographically defined
the Salem Village parish boundaries at this time as represented by Uphams map.
The remaining area of the Farms located south of the village continued to be part of
the town and came to be known as Salem Farms. The property owners living within
the boundaries of Salem Village were first listed on the village tax rolls in 1681; the
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FIGURE VII
Corrections to those accused of witchcraft on The Geography of
Witchcraft: Salem Village, 1692.
Procter was never listed on the village tax rolls. He was a prominent
member of the church in Salem Town from 1667 and remained so until
his excommunication and execution as a witch in 1692.
During the witchcraft episode, Procters great mistake was to
denounce the accusing girls and scoff at their afflictions, especially those
of his twenty-year-old servant, Mary Warren, whom he is said to have
beaten to stop her fits. Warren lived in the Procter house and was a close
friend of the young female accusers in the village. She was an active
accuser in her own right but was also accused of witchcraft herself when
she confessed in the court, saying that the other afflicted girls did but
dissemble.12 An additional W needs to be placed at the location of the
Procter house to represent Warrens accused status (see Figure VII).
rolls were updated every two or three years and thus constitute a record of the property owners in the village. The village inhabitants met regularly in the meetinghouse
to handle their affairs, which mainly concerned the village ministry and taxes and,
later, petitions for independent town status, which was not granted until 1752.
12 Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Witchcraft Papers, 3: 793.
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The W located to the far northwest just beyond the Salem Village
boundary in the area of Rowley Village (now Boxford) marks John
Willards house, as indicated on Uphams map. Property deeds show that
some of Willards large holdings lay within the Wills Hill area of Salem
Village in the northwest corner, and hence Willards name regularly
appears on village tax lists. Willard served as a deputy constable at the
time of the witchcraft accusations and was involved in arresting several
villagers, but he is said to have quit this work out of conscience and
mocked the arrests. He was subsequently accused, arrested, and eventually executed. Curiously, Boyer and Nissenbaum did not include Willard
in their numerical tally of accused village witches in Salem Possessed,
though he is consistently identified as a resident of the village in the
court documents and tax records.13
Also curious is their omission of four accused witches who lived just
to the north of Salem Village in the neighboring town of Topsfield. In
this same area, Boyer and Nissenbaum placed three As to represent
Topsfield accusers Phillip and Margaret Knight and Lydia Nichols, who
accused their immediate neighbors, William, Deliverance, and Abigail
Hobbs (who were also accused by several residents in the village). In
response to the accusations, Abigail Hobbs freely confessed to being a
witch and, in turn, accused the Reverend George Burroughs, a former
village minister disliked by the Putnam family and who lived in Wells,
Maine. In the same week, several village residents, including members of
the Putnam family, accused Topsfield resident Mary Towne Esty, Isaac
Estys wife, whose two sisters, Rebecca Towne Nurse and Sarah Towne
Cloyce, had already been accused in the village. All four Topsfield residents were well known to the accusers in Salem Village and quickly
ensnared in the early phase of the village accusations. The four large Ws
in Topsfield represent them (see Figure VII). The fully corrected map
represents the locations of those accused of witchcraft in Salem Village
and the bordering areas of Topsfield and Salem Farms within the same
geographic area as Boyer and Nissenbaums map (Figure VIII).
13 Charles W. Upham indicates that the location of John Willards house is
uncertain. See Upham, Salem Witchcraft, 1: xix. Based on analysis of property deeds,
Marilynne Roach has suggested that John and Margaret Willard may have been living in the Wills Hill area, perhaps with Margarets maternal relatives, near the large
Wilkins clan who lived in this part of the village (Roach, e-mail message to author,
October 2005). Robert Calefs book is the only source for Willards role as a deputy
constable. See Calef, More Wonders of the Invisible Word, 1700, in George Lincoln
Burr, ed., Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 16481706 (New York, 1914), 289393.
Compare with Upham, Salem Witchcraft, 2: 173.
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FIGURE VIII
Revised map of the accused residents of Salem Village and environs.
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FIGURE IX
Corrections to the accusers delineated on The Geography of Witchcraft:
Salem Village, 1692. Numbers after the householders names indicate the
number of accusers in the households (if more than one).
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but later signed the Nurse petition. Joseph Herrick Sr. was a constable
in Salem Village and apprehended a number of suspected witches. He
accused Good and Sarah Bishop yet, like Putnam and Sibley, came to
Nurses defense. James Holton contributed testimony supporting Mary
Walcotts and Hubbards depositions against John and Elizabeth Procter
yet also signed a petition of John Procters innocence. Though neither of
Holtons documents is dated, his testimony against Procter is marked
Jurat in Curia and was used as evidence at Procters trial, indicating that
the court had no doubt about Holtons charges and used them to convict. James Kettles testimonies present a complex situation. He initiated
a deposition against his neighbor Sarah Bishop, based on spectral testimony from Hubbard, and he contributed evidence in support of the
Reverend John Hales deposition against Bishop. But Kettle also testified
that when he spoke with Hubbard she told him severall untruthes.17
None of Kettles testimonies are dated, so it is difficult to address a
change of mind. The case against Bishop, which was not strong, never
came to trial. Nevertheless Kettles testimony, like that of others, became
part of the record and lent support to the momentum of the accusations
occurring in the village even if he changed his mind. In all these cases,
there is no indication that accusers were skeptical about the trials in
general, and only Holton appears to have had doubts about the guilt of
the person he accused. These five accusers appear as As on a revised map
to reflect the court records (see Figure IX).
In addition to these five omitted accusers, there are six individuals
who appear on the Salem Possessed map as Ds who were also accusers of
other people but do not appear on the map as As. They are Jonathan
Putnam; Joseph Hutchinson Sr. and his wife, Lydia; John Putnam Sr.
and his wife, Rebecca; and Joseph Holton Sr. In light of Boyer and
Nissenbaums comment about the omission of individuals who were
accusers and defenders, it would appear that the reader should assume
that any of the accusations made by these defenders should not be taken
seriously (hence their omission as As), though Boyer and Nissenbaum
do not discuss this omission. Each of these accusers was a defender of
Nurse, who was a close neighbor. Nevertheless the documents do not
give any reason to ignore the accusations that these same accusers made
against others.
Jonathan Putnam accused sisters Mary Esty and Nurse but later
signed the petition in Nurses defense, though he did not change his testimony against Esty. Joseph and Lydia Hutchinson were among the original
17
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complainants against Tituba, Sarah Osburn, and Sarah Good, yet both
stood by their neighbor Nurse. Joseph Hutchinson also submitted a
deposition that cast doubt on the reliability of Abigail Williams, one of
Nurses young accusers, pointing out that she told him she could easily
converse with the devil. John Putnam Sr. and his wife, Rebecca, testified
in court against former Salem Village minister George Burroughs, but
both came to Nurses defense. John Putnam Sr. also complained against
Martha Carrier and contributed testimony against John Willard and
Sarah Buckley. He accused Nurse of afflicting his son Jonathan but later
signed a petition in Nurses defense as did Jonathan. Nevertheless John
Putnam Sr.s testimony against Nurse was used in court at her trial.
Finally, Joseph Holton Sr., who signed the Nurse petition, was one of
the chief complainants against William Procter and several Andover people. There is no indication in any of the documents that these seven
accusers publicly showed their skepticism about the trials in general, as
Boyer and Nissenbaum suggest, or that they doubted the accusations
they made against others.18 These six accusers appear on a revised map
as large As (see Figure IX).
The eight afflicted girls were Sarah Churchill, Elizabeth Hubbard,
Mercy Lewis, Elizabeth Parris, Ann Putnam Jr., Mary Warren, Abigail
Williams, and Mary Walcott. The residences of these eight accusers are well
known. Boyer and Nissenbaum apparently omitted two more, eighteenyear-old Susannah Shelden and ten-year-old Jemima Rea, because they did
not think the young accusers decisively shaped the witchcraft outbreak.
Subsequent scholarship, however, has made it clear that this assumption,
based on the view that the afflicted girls were merely mouthpieces for
adult male villagers, is unsupportable. Bernard Rosenthals careful analysis
of the court documents in Salem Story illuminates the constant collaboration among the young accusers (quite independent of adult control) as
well as their deliberate acts of lying and deception. Mary Beth Nortons
illuminating study of these same young women in In the Devils Snare
deepens current understanding of their reduced social status and the
traumatized background of some who were the victims of Indian attacks
in the 167576 King Philips War.19 Nortons and Rosenthals accounts
make it abundantly clear that the afflicted girls played key roles in the
progress of the accusations in the village and that they helped to maintain control of the dynamics of the legal process inside and outside the
courtroom on an almost daily basis. As Norton points out, two or three
Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 35.
Bernard Rosenthal, Salem Story: Reading the Witch Trials of 1692 (Cambridge,
1993); Norton, In the Devils Snare.
18
19
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the interests they represented. For example two of the most active
accusers, Ann Putnam Jr. and Mercy Lewis, were members of Thomas
Putnams household, and Putnam was one of the most active of the village complainants. Placing all ten junior female accusers on the corrected map as As makes a difference in the east-west pattern because
seven of them lived on the eastern side of the demarcation line: Sarah
Churchill, Elizabeth Hubbard, Elizabeth Parris, Jemima Rea, Susannah
Shelden, Mary Warren, and Abigail Williams (see Figure IX).21
Boyer and Nissenbaum also apparently overlooked thirteen mostly
adult accusers, now added as larger As to the revised map (see Figure
IX). Their omission is surprising because three of them, Samuel Parris,
John Indian, and Tituba, were residents of the prominent Parris household, and all three figure significantly in the court documents. All three
are placed at the Parris house, located just to the east of the Boyer and
Nissenbaum demarcation line, and grouped with the two As representing Abigail Williams and Elizabeth Parris. In the Parris household, there
was a total of five accusers, more than in any other village household.
Ten other As represent Deliverance Hobbs and her daughter, Abigail,
who confessed and accused several villagers who had already been
accused; Lydia Nicholss two daughters Lydia and Elizabeth, who
accused Abigail Hobbs, and her son Thomas, who accused John Willard;
Sarah Holton, who accused Rebecca Nurse; Bathshua Pope, who became
afflicted at several grand jury hearings and cried out at the accused;
Joseph Pope, who testified against John Procter; and Joseph Herrick Sr.
and his wife, Mary, who both accused Sarah Good.
In sum the corrected map of the accusations in Salem Village shows
an additional thirty-four accusers, most of whom lived on the eastern
side of the village (Figure X). Putting accusers and accused together on
the same map shows that there is no pronounced east-west division.
Twenty-eight accusers appear on the eastern side of the east-west line
and forty on the western side. The east-west distribution of accused
witches is less even, but there are enough in the west so that the situation is not one sided. Clearly, accusers and accused did not live on
opposite sides of the village as Boyer and Nissenbaum stated. Mapping
all who made accusations in the same geographic area as Boyer and
21 Sarah Churchills location is not indicated on Figure IX because George
Jacobs Sr.s residence, where she lived, was located in Northfields, an area that lies
outside the range of Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaums map. There were several
additional accusers in Salem Farms. For example, in the house of widow Alice
Schafflin there were three accusers, Alices daughters Alice and Elizabeth Booth and
daughter-in-law Elizabeth Booth. The Schafflin house also lies just outside the frame
of the Boyer and Nissenbaum map.
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FIGURE X
Accusers (A) and accused (W) in Salem Village and environs.
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equidistant from most of the village residents and thus at the villages
approximate demographic center. Moving the line closer to the meetinghouse would not significantly change the east-west ratio of accusers to
accused as Boyer and Nissenbaum represented it.22
The unpublished version of the accusations map, interestingly,
shows a diagonal line instead of a vertical one and divides the village in
half from northeast to southwest (see Figure VI). This line appears to
have been drawn so that it placed as many Ws as possible on the eastern
side of the village. This strategy, however, left eight As on the eastern
side. Comparing the diagonal version to the vertical one, which shows
only two As in the east, suggests that the purpose of the vertical arrangement was to keep as many As in the west and as many Ws in the east as
possible. Placing the vertical line so that it almost too neatly separates
the closely clustered households at the center and thus keeping several
As to the west of it strengthens this interpretation. It seems, therefore,
that the location of the vertical demarcation line on the map was
intended to show as dramatically as possible that Salem Village was geographically divided against itself, with nearly all As in the west and most
Ws in the east.
According to Salem Possessed, there was a deep-seated economic division
between the more prosperous and commercially minded Townoriented farmers and entrepreneurs on the eastern side of the village and
along the Ipswich Road and the poorer, conservatively minded agrarian
farmers in the more isolated, less fertile land in the west. In at least two
important respectsquality of land and access to marketthose farmers
on the eastern (or Town) side of the Village had a significant [economic]
advantage. One can use the tax rate information from the Salem Village
Record Book to show the three different tax levels in a single display for
the year 168990, two years before the outbreak of the accusations (Figure
XI). At the lowest tax level, there are twenty-six households on the western side and thirteen on the eastern; thus about twice as many of the
poorest families (in terms of landholdings) lived in the western area. The
middle tax range shows twelve households in the west and fifteen in the
22 The Salem Village map in Boyer et al.s Enduring Vision appears to locate the
dividing line somewhat to the east of the meetinghouse. By contrast historian
George Lincoln Burr refers to Ingersolls Tavern as the recognized centre of the
Village. The meeting-house [property] adjoined it to the east, to the west the parsonage, where lived Mr. Parris. See Burr, Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 153 n. 1.
If Ingersolls Tavern, marked on Uphams map by the symbol + (see Figure V),
were the village center, the location of the demarcation line would be farther to the
east, thus shifting a number of the accusers and accused in Samuel Parriss house to
the west.
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FIGURE XI
Tax rates in Salem Village, 168990.
east, an almost even distribution. The top level tax range includes six
households in the west and seven in the east, again, an almost even distribution. Except for the lowest economic level, the map reveals a fairly
homogeneous distribution of wealth across the village. Salem Village was
not therefore divided into radically different eastern and western economic groups, and, as Richard Latner has shown, a comparison of the tax
records over time also does not reveal any significant change in the geographic distribution of wealth over the years.23
23 Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 93 (Town-oriented), 97 (entrepreneurs), 94 (two important respects). All the residents of Salem Village paid
annual taxes toward the ministers salary, and new tax rates were drawn up every few
years and entered into the village records. See Salem-Village Book of Record,
16721697, in A Book of Record of the Severall Publique Transa[c]tions of the
Inhabitants of Sale[m] Village Vulgarly Called the Farme[s], Historical Collections of
the Danvers Historical Society (Salem, Mass., 192526, 192829), 13: 91122, 14: 6599,
16: 6080, 17: 74103, in Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem-Village Witchcraft, 35355;
Boyer and Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed, 82. Curiously, Paul Boyer and Stephen
Nissenbaum use the tax rate list for the year 1695, three years after the witch trials
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FIGURE XII
Salem Village leadership, 168092, with the following abbreviations: c =
constable, d = deacon in the village church, m = officer in the militia, p = physician, r = village minister, s = Salem Town selectman, and v = village committee.
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FIGURE XIII
Signers of village ministry petitions of 1670.
amongst themselves within such bounds [of the village]) was not granted
to any of them under the notion of church members, but to the whole
number of inhabitants therefor their present ease, being so far from
the meeting-house here [in Salem Town].25 This ruling set the stage for
possible conflict between future church members in the village, once an
independent congregation was established there, and the rest of the village residents if they disapproved of the minister.
After repeated conflict and a succession of three ministers in the village in eighteen years, the last of whom, Deodat Lawson, left in 1687,
the town permitted the village to recruit a new minister who would be
ordained so that the village would be able to establish its own covenant
congregation. The search for a new minister, which led to Parriss
recruitment, was the work of several village men who would become
25
Ibid., 246.
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Ibid., 34957.
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FIGURE XIV
Signers of village independence petitions of January 1692.
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477
FIGURE XV
Geographic distribution of Salem Village covenant households, 168995.
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